I've written before about agflation and its relationship to Congress's decision to use a fifth of the country's corn for biofuels instead of for food. Global food prices were already on the rise before the Energy Bill passed in Washington, but new subsidies for ethanol caused farmers to convert more land to biofuels production and constrain the supply of other food crops further, just as an economic downturn, a weak dollar, and rising energy prices conspired to increase demand for food relative to other goods.

Biofuels were innocent enough when it was just hippies raiding fryolators to power their VW buses. But telling a nation that we can keep on truckin' by burning our next meal is a particularly harrowing example of jackass environmentalism. People in the global south are starving, and entire governments are tottering, just so we can keep on joyriding our pickups down the steepening back slope of Hubbert's Peak.

All this bears an uncomfortable similarity to old frontier stories of desperate subsistence farmers eating their seed crops to survive for the winter. Except this time, we're not even feeding ourselves - we're feeding our motor vehicles.

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